


The Hundred-Day War

by eponymous_rose



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: 3x01 spoilers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-16
Updated: 2016-02-16
Packaged: 2018-05-20 23:40:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,172
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6030139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eponymous_rose/pseuds/eponymous_rose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>“In the incredibly unlikely case of first contact with an alien species, remain calm. Remain completely calm. Take deep breaths and do everything in your power to avoid thinking about the enormity of the situation and the inherent fragility of your place in the universe. Take up yoga. Move back to the farm. Keep your loved ones close. Forget this ever happened.”</i> </p>
<p>- Preface, Pryce and Carter’s First Contact Protocol Manual</p>
<p>The <i>Hephaestus</i> crew deals with the immediate aftermath of humanity’s first contact. Just, you know, don’t say the “a”-word.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hundred-Day War

**Day Two**

Heart-rate monitor chirping in her ear. Familiar tonal register, well within the parameters of a gen zero A.I. unit's communication protocol.

Stop. Start again.

Heart-rate monitor chirping in her ear. Hand on her hand, warm and soft. Hand over hand over hand. Heavy sigh. Heavy weight. Wrong hand.

Stop. Start again.

Heart-rate monitor chirping in her ear. Back to the start, broken arm, broken heart. Gonna have to clean out Officer Fisher's quarters sometime. Write a letter home. Write home and write home and write home, but it always comes back unread. Return to sender.

Stop. Start again.

Heart-rate monitor chirping in her ear. Eyes open. Alive.

_Damn_ it.

* * *

**Day Three**

Hera's the one who tells her.

Minkowski hovers nervously at her bedside, dark circles under her eyes. Drifts up and down the length of the room. She's always been borderline masochistic when it comes to military protocol—back when she had to pretend to care about that sort of thing, Lovelace found it easier to go with a buzz cut—but now Minkowski's hair is flaring in coiled strands around her messy ponytail, a zero-g double-helix that speaks to her exhaustion.

Minkowski says, "Thank you," and her voice cracks. She looks away. She steels herself, looks back, makes Eye Contact in a way that broadcasts the capital letters. "You saved my life. That panel would've taken my head off if you hadn't..."

Lovelace doesn't remember making that call, isn't sure she would've had time to consciously push Minkowski out of the way. She does remember the shrapnel in her gut. She says, "Yeah, well, don't say I never did nothing for ya."

Minkowski has her hands clasped behind her back. Normally, she drifts like she's got a stick up her ass, like someone else is bobbing her up and down in a puppet show. Now that she's stopped staring at Lovelace, she's slipping slowly to one side, drifting off-axis. Off-kilter. "I wanted to see how you were feeling," she says. The further she drifts from vertical, the stranger her face looks, like when you draw eyes on your chin and lie with your head tilted back, and voila, you got yourself a little conehead. Hi-larious.

When Lovelace only shrugs in response, Conehead-Minkowski looks like she's mulling something over. She says, "Hilbert thinks—"

Stop.

"—that much blood, it was really alarming. It could take months for you to recover fully."

Start again.

Lovelace dredges up a smile. "I guess this means I'm off the duty roster for a while. Finally get a chance to watch some movies. Please tell me they sent you out here with a good library to choose from."

Minkowski smiles back, startled, and stops her spin with an outstretched hand. "That depends on how much you like _Home Alone 2_."

"A masterpiece of modern cinema," Lovelace says, and then, with no change of intonation, "The dead man's switch on my arm is gone. You disarmed it."

Minkowski inhales sharply, like someone trying to wake herself from a nightmare. Drifts back, anchors herself with a hand against a counter. Eye Contact. "We didn't have to. Your heart stopped. Under a minute, but it was enough to spark the detonation sequence."

Don't want to say it. Have to say it. Be a big girl. "And yet we're still alive. We're still here."

And suddenly Hera's voice, splitting and shaking and glitching with fury: "N-n-not all of us."

* * *

**Day Five**

Hilbert comes in alone, unsupervised, to change her dressings. She waits until he finishes wrapping the bandages around her midsection, cool and clinical, and then she reaches for the scalpel mag-clamped to the table behind him, pushes off from her bed with shaking legs, and slams them both up against a wall. She presses the scalpel against his throat gently, carefully, waits until he takes a shaking breath and the bobbing of his adam's apple slides the blade against the skin.

"You should not be out of bed," he says, hoarsely. Her vision sparks and blurs and wavers. She can't tell if he's smiling when he speaks.

"What did you do to me," she says softly, not a question, and draws the scalpel back to press her arm in a bar against his throat. Leans in. He makes a choking sound, but doesn't struggle, doesn't push back. "What did you do."

He kicks one leg back against the wall, a helpless, spasmodic motion, and so she leans back, releasing the pressure on his throat until he coughs, writhes in her grasp. The sound of it resonates. Sounds like Hui, choking up his lungs toward the end. Sounds like—

"I saved your life," he spits. Scalpel against skin. Her vision has cleared enough to see the whites of his eyes. "I revived you when your heart stopped! What evil motivation could I possibly have for doing that?"

Behind her, Minkowski has entered the room, is saying her name in a worried tone of voice. Lovelace tastes blood. Feels a spreading warmth against the fresh bandages around her gut. Sees the droplets welling up along the scalpel's edge. "I was gone," she says, conversational. "I left. I was gone. And now I'm back. I always come back. And this time, I know who's to blame."

Hilbert looks past her. "Commander, please!"

" _Lovelace_."

Lovelace draws back so quickly that tiny spheres of Hilbert's blood flare out in a constellation at his throat. Minkowski's pulled her pistol, is clutching it in shaking hands. "Go ahead," Lovelace says. Drops the scalpel from numb fingers.

"Oh, lord," Minkowski says, softly, and holsters her pistol, drifting closer. "Hilbert, she's bleeding again."

"Wound showed signs of infection, also. Fever almost certainly responsible for _some_ of her violent response. Had hoped to avoid further surgical intervention, but it may now be inevitable." Hilbert grabs a dressing, presses it to the wound at his throat. "Administer sedative, Commander. She will not trust me to do it."

Lovelace laughs, high and shaky, as Minkowski takes her arm, lends her the momentum to press firmly into the bed. "I was _dead_. The damage was done. I wasn't a threat to you anymore. What is _wrong_ with you people? Why in the hell would you bring me back if not for some... some perverse..."

"Hey, stay with me," Minkowski says. "Hilbert. Sedative. Now."

Lovelace hears the hiss of the applicator, slumps back against the pillow, breathing hard.

"Lovelace," Minkowski says. Hand on her hand. "You're a part of this crew. Okay? Like it or not, you're a part of this team, and we don't just let—"

Stop.

Over Minkowski's shoulder, Lovelace watches Hilbert pulling surgical scrubs over his clothing. He catches her gaze. Smiles, his teeth glinting in the gathering darkness.

Start again.

* * *

**Day Eight**

Shadows, nightmarish, looming over her bed. But it's fine. Everything's copacetic. Things that go bump in the night are almost a relief. At least they don't pretend. Heavy, pulsating shapes, a weight on her chest, the bed sinking down around her in a strange specter of gravity. Nothing new there.

But she falls asleep again, inevitably, drifts warm and cold against her restraints. Sits a while with Fourier in the mess hall, draws her into a detailed discussion of which of their rationed supply of foodstuffs would be best suited for pranks to play on Lambert. Says aloud, once, "Put it in his shaving cream," and giggles until she hears Minkowski say her name. Mutters, in her general direction, "Buzzkill." Sleeps some more.

Doug Eiffel's at her bedside, for a bit, and she lets herself... she lets herself believe it, just a little. Just for now. Nothing to say, just companionable silence. Nobody trying to kill anyone. Nobody lying. Nobody dying. "Oh, you're _so_ totally dying," he tells her, and she flips him off.

She doesn't die. She stops. She starts again.

* * *

**Day Thirteen**

She's officially discharged from the sickbay almost two weeks after her injury, eight days after her second surgery. And, well, it's not like anybody was gonna stop her if she'd decided to leave early, but nearly bleeding out for the second time _sucked_. Better to avoid that if at all possible. Live to fight another day. Live to watch the televised archive of the inglorious decline of Macaulay Culkin's career one more time.

It's strange to be drifting the halls of _Hephaestus_ again. Things look... well, they look pretty not-great. Also blue. Very, very blue. Turns out you don't really register how much the ambient lighting is influenced by your friendly neighborhood red dwarf until said friendly neighborhood red dwarf becomes, you know, not so red and a whole lot friendlier.

She floats to a bulkhead, puts her hand to the ship's hull. Feels vibrations that are less like the purr of a big cat and more like something jammed in a garbage disposal. Tries to remember this particular spot, with its great view over the forward thrusters to the star beyond. Did Fourier sneak up here sometimes? Lambert? Did Eiffel ever—

Stop.

"Hera? Are you there?"

Start again.

A voice chock-full of strained politeness. "Captain, I have to answer when you call, we've been over this, but now is not a good time. It's not going to _be_ a good time at any point in the foreseeable future. I'm a little busy."

Voice light. Calm. "What if it's a matter of life or death?"

A sigh, equal parts exhaustion and exasperation. "At this point, it would be more impressive if it weren't."

Lovelace reaches a hand under her shirt to scratch at her bandages, watching bursts of plasma through the filtered window. "In that case, can I ask you something?"

"Are you actually asking if it's okay, or telling me you're about to ask it no matter what?"

"That depends whether you'd say yes if I asked."

"No."

Lovelace smiles. "I'm telling, then. Humor me, Hera?"

Another sigh. Strange habit for someone without lungs. "Fine. What is it?"

"Is there anything—" Watch the plasma writhe. Be a big girl. "I know it's a long shot, but is there anything left of Rhea? Any, I don't know, any snippets of code? I was thinking about her, before. I think I owe it to her to ask. We never found Fourier. Maybe there's one more crew member I can put to rest."

A soft, startled, "Oh."

Lovelace swallows in the silence that follows. For a second, she barely feels the pull of the surgical incision. _Everything_ feels like a raw wound.

Hera's voice is muted when she speaks again. "I... I looked, actually, after the commander and— after your logs were found. It's hard to delete something as complicated as an A.I. so completely that it leaves no trace." A surge of anger. "Hilbert managed to pull it off."

Lovelace presses the palms of her hands against her eyes once, quickly. "Yeah, I know. I know. I don't know what I expected when I asked. It's just. She was a friend." Silence. "Hera, if you have something to say, just say it."

Silence, again. Then, in an explosion of glitchy static, "If this is a ploy to get me to... to pity you? To feel sorry for you? To _forgive_ you? If this is some we're-not-that-different-you-and-I bullshit, I don't know if— I don't know what—" A shaky breath. "I don't know. Okay? There are things I know and there are things I don't know, and the part of me that knows which is which got torn out and stitched back together piecemeal with the rest of my brain. There's just, there's you and there's Hilbert, and frankly I don't think I'd mind a whole lot if either of you mysteriously met with an accident, except that we're probably going to need you to keep us alive long enough to find Doug. And in the meantime I'm going to protect the Commander, because she's what I have left. You're not going to— I won't let you—" Another silence, and then, more softly, "Please don't do anything to hurt her. I can't... I know I wouldn't be able to stop you in time."

Lovelace closes her eyes, presses her forehead against the smooth surface of the wall. Drifts with the jarring, grinding hum of the engines reverberating in her skull. "I don't want to hurt anyone. I never wanted to hurt anyone."

"Yeah." A sigh, heavier than before. "Yeah, well. You can't always get what you want."

* * *

**Day Twenty-One**

"I can help."

Minkowski crosses her arms. Her hair is loose around her face, flaring out in all directions. The bruises under her eyes have taken the appearance of war paint. She looks more like a particularly grumpy rugby player than the commander of a space station. But she's still, apparently, determined to be diplomatic. "I don't know that you helping is a great idea, Lovelace. Hilbert and I are doing all right with these repairs." She takes a breath, like she's about to say something else, then shakes her head.

"You're giving him access to key systems?" Lovelace asks, mildly.

Minkowski wrinkles her nose. "I don't especially want this station to blow up in my face. I don't think he especially wants that, either. We've had this conversation, Lovelace."

"Call it a highlight reel. I want to be somewhere I can keep an eye on him, and I know for a fact that you could use the extra pair of hands." Too aggressive. Dial it back. "I'm not trying to step on your toes, Minkowski. I'll play ball. But how long's it been since you slept?"

Minkowski hugs herself, drifts over to bump against a bulkhead. It's hard to hide tears in zero-g; they well up around your eyes, bubble over. She scrubs at her face, irritably. "Sometimes it feels like I'm holding this station together with my bare hands."

Hera's voice, quiet, steady, "Commander. You need rest. It's been... you've had a lot on your mind. I'll walk Lovelace through rewiring the circuitry for aft deck airlock number three. She'll be able to draw up a plan from here."

"We'll be fine," Lovelace says. "Give your hands a rest. You'll need 'em again in the morning."

Minkowski snorts, but Lovelace can see the surrender in the slump of her shoulders as she drifts out of the room. "No such thing as morning in space."

"You tell 'em, kid," Lovelace says, and Hera says, "Goodnight, Commander," and for exactly four seconds she thinks they could, conceivably, be all right.

* * *

**Day Thirty-Four**

They're tired. They're all tired. They're making mistakes, snapping at each other. Hitting that first month, the actual official turning-over of a page on their mental calendars, made everything seem more real. Lovelace has seen enough rescues become recoveries. A month is a long, long time.

"Pass me screwdriver," Hilbert says.

Minkowski's head is on a swivel; she turns from across the room to look at Lovelace, the way she does every time Hilbert addresses her directly. Smiling, Lovelace grabs a socket wrench from the toolbox and places it in Hilbert's hand.

"Screwdriver. Not... oh, so this is your little joke. Very funny. Ha ha." He shoves past her to get at the toolkit. "Commander Minkowski, I must protest—"

"God, do you even hear yourself," Lovelace says, mildly, watching as he digs in vain through the toolbox. She's got the screwdriver he's looking for floating just behind her back. "Anything goes wrong, you go running straight to the nearest authority figure to complain. No wonder you were so pathetically eager to give up your secrets when Doug pretended to be calling from Command. Hah. Yeah, he told me about that one."

"Lovelace," Minkowski says, warningly.

"We don't have time for this," Hera says. "I haven't fully calibrated to the new energy spectrum emitted by the star. This solar flare's gonna happen _soon_ , and this part of the station isn't properly shielded yet!"

"No, Hera, by all means," Hilbert says, spinning to face Lovelace. If Minkowski moves jerkily and unnaturally in zero-g, Hilbert moves with a strange grace that puts her in mind of flowing water. Or a snake. "By all means, let's stop everything so Captain Lovelace can try to provoke me."

"Do. Not. Try to play the victim here, Hilbert," Minkowski says.

Lovelace tips back slightly, grinning. "What's the matter? Mommy never loved you enough?"

Hera: "Guys."

Hilbert stares at Lovelace, then says, very slowly, "Are you frustrated, Captain, that you no longer qualify as one of those authority figures? Does it irk you that all that's left of your first command is a pile of corpses?"

Lovelace breathes, feels the pull of the scar tissue along her midsection. Says, in a voice barely above a whisper, "Not quite all. There's still you, Doctor Selberg. I could complete the whole set, if you're too cowardly to do the honors."

Hera again, more insistent: " _Guys_."

Minkowski pushes off from the wall toward them. "That's enough. Hilbert, I _will_ pull your personal hygiene privileges again. Lovelace, give Hilbert the damn screwdriver."

"He can come take it."

She's about to say more, but a blare of static makes her double over, trying to cover her ears in pain.

"Oh my god, stop talking!" Hera bellows. "I've managed to get most of the radiation shields active for this room, but there is a solar flare imminent! Magnetic field fluctuations are going to make it a bumpy ride. Anchor yourselves, shield your eyes, and—"

The wave hits.

Lovelace's eyes are still closed in the wake of the burst of noise, but the black of her eyelids goes red for a moment, and then the shock hits and she barely has time to grab the edge of her console. She hears Minkowski grunt in pain, opens her eyes to see the commander, untethered, richochet off the ceiling and land in a dazed heap in a corner of the room. The deckplates shift one more time in the aftershock, dropping out from under them. Hilbert's lost his grip on his bolted-down chair and is drifting—

She reaches out, grabs him by the ankle before he can be flung into a bulkhead. Holds him in place until the shaking stops, then pushes him away and swims to Minkowski, who's hunched up against the wall, rubbing her forehead. "You good?"

"Yeah," Minkowski says. There's a bit of blood bubbling up between her fingers. "Yeah, I think so. Just hit my head. Hera, status?"

"We're okay, Commander. Minimal damage. I mean, no more maximal than usual, anyway. And the readings I got during the storm will make future flares much more predictable."

"Let me see." Lovelace pushes Minkowski's hand away, scowls at the cut in her hairline. "That looks like it needs stitches."

"I'll take her to sickbay," Hilbert says. He's still clinging to a console as though for dear life, his eyes wide, hands shaking. He looks... startled. "Captain Lovelace. Thank you for—"

Stop.

The look on Dr. Selberg's face when Lambert attended the morning briefing with bright pink stubble on his chin.

Start again.

Lovelace gives Minkowski a little push toward Hilbert, then drifts away, back to her console. "Minkowski's bleeding, here. Just get her patched up. Hera, walk me through what you can until they get back. We've got work to do."

* * *

**Day Fifty-Five**

"You punched a wall, there."

Lovelace doesn't look up, grinning into her cup of... well... seaweed something-or-other-that-kinda-tastes-like-coffee. "Technically, I punched a bulkhead."

Minkowski drifts next to her, then pulls up a chair. She actually straddles it backwards. Minkowski going for casual is about as convincing as a rock trying to pass for a jellyfish.

"Ooh," Lovelace says. "Is this the part where we have a warm heart-to-heart and I have greater respect for your authority from every moment thereafter?"

"No," Minkowski says. "This is the part where I check to make sure you don't have a broken hand."

Lovelace glances over at her, and look, Lovelace has seen a lot of very tired people. She's _been_ a lot of very tired people. But even stacked against all those examples, Minkowski has settled into tiredness with a weird mixture of grace and poise. She looks... well, she's too young to pull off _grizzled_ , but that's less obvious than it was a couple months ago. The exhaustion takes the brittle edge off her stick-up-the-ass posture, adds a depth to her too-eager expression. Hell. Command had no idea what they were dealing with when they wasted her out here.

Lovelace holds out her hand, flexes it. Winces at the skin pulling along the split knuckles.

"Okay," Minkowski says. "Nothing broken. That's item one off the to-do list. Item two: why in the hell did you punch a bulkhead?"

Lovelace snorts. "Did Hera rat on me? Of course she did."

"Were you fighting with Hera?" Minkowski blinks. "Wait, did you actually try to _punch the space station_?"

"What? No!" Lovelace pauses. "Although I might just have to try that at some point."

"Okay. So why did you punch a wall?"

"Bulkhead."

" _Lovelace_."

Lovelace shrugs. Takes another swig of seaweed water. "I don't remember."

That catches Minkowski off-guard. "What?"

"Can I ask you something?"

Minkowski leans against the back of her chair, scratching at the scar on her forehead. "Are you going to punch a wall if you don't like the answer?"

"I'm a woman on the edge," Lovelace says, deadpan. "Don't push me, copper."

"Okay," Minkowski says. "Shoot. But not literally. I feel I should probably specify that these days."

Lovelace dutifully laughs at the weak quip, then slips back into deadpan. Quiet. Calm. "I understand you found some of my logs. Do you know what happened to Officer Mace Fisher?"

Minkowski cocks her head to one side. "That name... yeah, that name rings a bell."

"He was caught in a meteor shower. He was outside the station at the time."

"I... yes. We heard that log." Minkowski shifts her weight. "I'm sorry."

Lovelace sucks the last of the seaweed-coffee concoction through her straw. "It's... it's funny, because that's the one death I don't think I can pin on Hilbert. It was a simple mistake. Hui miscalculated, the meteor shower hit a day earlier than expected. That was the one death that was on me. No external forces. No evil machinations. Just me, boldly going straight into disaster."

"No, no," Minkowski says, too quickly, "No, you can't blame yourself for something like that. It's an accident. That happens, out here."

"Selberg helped me clean out his quarters. Hell, maybe he had something to do with messing with Hui's calculations. But I thought... in that moment, I thought he was being so kind." She has to make a concerted effort not to flinch away when Minkowski puts a hand on her arm, but at least the kid has enough sense not to try to say anything. Lovelace takes a breath. "Doug told me about some of the stuff you've been through together."

Minkowski's grip tightens, releases at the mention of his name, but her voice is carefully neutral. "We have been through a lot."

"He told me... he told me he was caught out in a solar storm. He was injured, couldn't pull himself back, his suit was malfunctioning, filling with water from the cooling system. And you jumped into the storm, untethered, with only a damn _jetpack_ , to drag his sorry ass back on board."

"I was terrified," Minkowski says, softly. "I wasn't even thinking at the time, but when I dragged him back inside and he wasn't breathing..."

Lovelace rubs her face. "God. I... I keep thinking about that story, because when Fisher died we were hit with so much turbulence that I was knocked down, broke my arm badly. While he was getting bludgeoned to death by space rocks, I was getting to know what my ulna looked like from the outside. Some dashing commander I turned out to be. Forget saving my crew from a bonafide killer and the twisted corporation backing him. I couldn't manage a little bit of bad weather."

Minkowski's quiet for a long moment, then says. "It was luck. I mean that. You were in an impossible situation. I wasn't. It was sheer luck."

"Yeah, well, I don't know that I would have had the guts to fling myself into a solar storm."

Minkowski snorts. "Isabel, if there's one thing I know for sure about you, it's that you would have done that in a heartbeat. I'm pretty sure you don't even particularly like me, and you still almost died saving my life."

Lovelace shakes her head, picks up her cup from its magnetized table, lets it drift in front of her nose. "You know, I don't actually remember that? I don't remember that being a conscious decision. It wasn't noble. It was... it was muscle-memory. Training. Something ingrained. It wasn't noble."

"Yeah, well, I don't think anybody wakes up, looks in the mirror, and tells themselves they're gonna go out and be a hero today. But that's just how it works, I think. You do something good, you're allowed to take some of the credit. You can't have it both ways, after all. If you're not allowed to take credit for the successes you couldn't control, you shouldn't be taking the blame for the failures." Minkowski snatches the cup away from Lovelace's face, takes a sip. _Tries_ to take a sip. "Aw. Empty. I was thinking that could be, you know, a great bonding moment."

Lovelace rolls her eyes, then pushes out of her chair. "I should get back to it."

Minkowski watches her drift. "Back to what, exactly? Punching bulkheads? Being a hero?"

Lovelace shrugs. "We'll try a little from Column A, a little from Column B. See where it goes from there."

And when she smiles, Minkowski sheds her exhaustion like a second skin.

* * *

**Day Eighty-Nine**

"You can't go in there."

Lovelace heaves an exasperated sigh, leaning on the door-open switch. "Hera, I'm a communications officer. That's my job. I need to at least set foot in the comms room every now and then to make sure things are shipshape."

"There's no equipment inside the comms room that isn't also present elsewhere on the ship," Hera says, stiffly. "Hey, there's an idea. Why don't you go there? Elsewhere? Literally anywhere else?"

To amuse herself, Lovelace taps the door-open button in the pattern of the morse code for 'SOS' over and over. "You let Minkowski in here all the time to send her distress calls."

"Minkowski is a member of this station's crew."

Lovelace sighs. "You want me to call her up and make you open this door?"

"Ooh, absolutely! But only if I can put Hilbert on the line and have him hear you calling an authority figure for help."

In spite of herself, Lovelace cracks a smile. "Okay. That's a zinger."

"Thanks. Go away."

"Boy, that politeness protocol sure wore off fast, huh?" Lovelace hesitates, then starts tapping morse code again, dot, dot-dot, dot-dot-dash-dot-

"S-s-stop that," Hera says, her voice breaking, splitting. "What's wrong with you? Go do something else."

Lovelace puts her hands up in mock surrender, steps back from the door. Rubs her arms. "Are you dropping the temperatures in this corridor to get me to leave?"

"Only because I can't vent atmosphere. Why do you even want to go in there?" Before Lovelace can open her mouth, Hera says, sharply, " _Stop lying_."

"I miss Doug." The words don't... they don't come from anywhere conscious. She says them, and then she can't take them back. She thinks about her first raw, honest talk with Hera. Minkowski's definition of heroism. God. What a mess.

The silence stretches. Hera's incredulity subroutine's working on all cylinders when she says, " _What_?"

Lovelace turns. "Forget it. Forget it."

The door opens behind her. "Just... just go. Before I change my mind."

Lovelace drifts in, turns in a slow circle. The room's half-clean, like Minkowski started tidying and then thought better of it halfway through. There's a clipboard next to the microphone, half covered in a tidy scrawl, half scribbled over. There are... god, there are like seventy candy wrappers or something floating in a corner where the HVAC system can't get at them. There are a sparse number of tick marks painstakingly carved into the side of a shelving unit, under the heading 'Minkowski cracked a smile'.

Lovelace sits in the chair. Leans back. Same damn seat with the lousy lumbar support, didn't even bother swapping it out between crews. Closes her eyes. Zero friends. Zero trust. Zero safety. One big-ass bomb. One more mission.

Hera says, softly, "What are you going to do?"

Lovelace's eyes snap open. Her heartbeat's thrumming loud in her ears. Return to sender. "My job."

It takes her mere minutes to decipher Doug's shorthand, to push through the history of the frequencies at which the mysterious music was broadcast. Stacked, they make a pattern, something with numbers and ratios. And hell, she's no mathematician, but Doug's clearly got the same idea—he's scrawled 'Fibonacci?' next to a painstakingly detailed sketch of stick figures getting zapped by a flying saucer.

Which means the next frequency is in the range— "That... that looks right," Hera says, sounding impressed in spite of herself. "Minkowski's distress calls have been wide-band, but with something more focused—"

Lovelace nods, opens a channel. "This is... this is Captain Isabel Lovelace aboard the _U.S.S. Hephaestus_ station. We are in need of urgent assistance." She breathes, opens the channel, listens to the hiss and buzz of static. "I repeat: we are in need of assistance. Please respond."

After a minute or two of static, Hera says, grudgingly, "It was a good thought."

"Huh," Lovelace says. "I guess it was a bit of a long shot. I'll keep trying for a while, if it's okay with you, Hera. It feels nice to be doing something."

A pause. "I know what you mean. Good luck, Captain."

"You too, Hera."

And then silence, popping and crackling over the open comms channel. Lovelace rubs at her face, leans forward in her chair. Picks up the microphone. Pauses as the sheer ridiculousness of her situation sinks in. She's about to make a distress call on an extremely narrow band aimed squarely at the center of the star in hopes that someone... that _something_ will answer. It's inevitably going to fail, and they'll be back to their futile repair schedule, but in the meantime?

In the meantime, she's going to spend a few hours looking at a future that isn't doom and gloom. She's going to spend a few hours hoping.

Stop.

Start again and again and again.

_This is communications officer Doug Eiffel_ —

She takes a deep breath. Smiles. "This is Captain Isabel Lovelace aboard the _U.S.S. Hephaestus_ station. To all little green, grey, or variously colored aliens out there, we're coming at you live with an important message: you wouldn't know it to look at us, but believe it or not, we come in peace."


End file.
